I read a report in the Observer over the weekend that a new grouping called the Alcohol Health Alliance will launch this week, calling for a 10% rise in taxation on booze, and a ban on advertising it on TV before 9pm - and I see that they have today launched their campaign. The Observer went further, going on to quote a Professor Sir Michael Marmot from University College London, as saying that that doesn’t go nearly far enough, and that alcohol prices should be doubled, to discourage people from drinking - indeed this is highlighted in the article’s headline “Call for price of bring to double to cut bingeing”. Their piece generally runs through all the evils of drinking, and why the government is concerned about this.

Now, I don’t seek to dispute for a moment the medical and other evidence that alcohol is quite clearly bad for your health. This is particularly true in relation to young people, a focus for this article and these calls.

But what I find extraordinary is the Observer’s - and indeed even the BBC’s - apparently unquestioning acceptance that the government should obviously therefore be looking into further restricting access to it. While they do both briefly quote a spokesman from the British Beer and Pub Association pointing out that doing any of this would ‘further restrict personal freedoms’, it is quite clear that they are only really interested in the case for doing some of this. (I see here that the drinks industry has launched its own salvo in reply to this initiative, but a self-interested response from the industry with a direct financial interest hardly qualifies as a response on the principle).

This incredibly authoritarian and nanny-ish government does actually seem to have brainwashed us all that it is acceptable to prevent people taking decisions about their own lives. I have witnessed this in other discussions about public health policy, where no-one even seems to challenge the fact that simply because the government has set a target for achieving some goal that will improve health, we should therefore be forcing people to change their behaviour to do it.

Good health is obviously a good thing, and in a variety of roles, including as the provider of healthcare, the government does have an interest in promoting it. So I fully support them laying on things like courses to help people stop smoking. But actually forcing people to stop taking informed personal decisions to change their behaviour in a particular way, is something quite different.

There are lots of things that I as an individual should be actually prevented from doing. Murdering someone, for example. But if I make a positive decision that I want to drink more alcohol, then I should be allowed to do that. And what’s more, my freedom to do that is not just important for me, but for our whole culture of liberty - and scarcely less importantly, also for our culture of self-responsibility that goes with it.

Actually banning smoking in public places was a classic dilemma of this area of policy - I actually supported the ban - but smoking in public seems to me qualitatively different: smoking actually harms other people (and probably no less important for its public support, it is also unpleasant for them too!).

And of course the involvement of young people, who are deemed not to be capable of taking fully informed decisions on their own, always creates an additional aspect. People with particular health conditions, perhaps particularly some mental health conditions, also require special treatment.

But in general I find it extraordinary that simply because something will improve your health, the government thinks it acceptable to force you to do it. And I find it if anything even more bizarre that no-one much - even liberals - even seems to challenge this conclusion.

To an extent you can take your pick about where you draw the line between going from being acceptable encouragement and incentive, to being near-compulsion: you could certainly for example make the case that a 10% rise in taxation on alcohol is legitimate encouragement, but a 100% rise would be close to coercion.

But my point is that we don’t even seem to be having this argument. We actually seem to want this almost literal manifestation of the “nanny state”. Maybe the government really should just employ an army of such people to bring our meals round and feed them to us, and not let us having our pudding until we’ve eaten up all our greens.